How to recreate complicated/customized reports in NXT

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Cindy Filler
Cindy Filler ✭
Seventh Anniversary Facilitator 1 Name Dropper Photogenic
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussion
We are going to be moving to NXT in the next few months.  I've created hundreds of what we call BI reports using SQL Reporting Services.  I need to figure out how to recreate those reports in NXT.  I don't see a way to do it with Analyze.  I've got print keys of 3 sample reports below.  I'd appreciate any guidance...  I need to figure out a way to recreate these before we go live. 


These 3 samples are not necessarily the most difficult ones I've done as some reports cross over between RE and FE.  But they are 3 key reports that are used on a regular basis.









 
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  • Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE
    Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 3 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Ugh, hundreds of SSRS reports and you're moving to a product that doesn't allow access to the SQL tables.  That right there is a nightmare that wakes me up at night in a cold sweat.  


    Would be great to hear Blackbaud's recommendation for this, hopefully someone responds.  I've had a similar question and one reason we are not considering NXT at the moment.


    As for your deadline of recreating the reports before going live I think your only option is to export the data (to xls, accdb, csv, etc.) from RE.  


    They are working on "Report Builder" but who knows when that will be available, and there might be an additional cost.  There is also limited API functionality currently available, probably not enough to recreate your reports.  Check here for details.


    Also check this thread for more information on "Sky Reporting"


     
  • Cindy Filler
    Cindy Filler ✭
    Seventh Anniversary Facilitator 1 Name Dropper Photogenic

    Jarod Bonino:

    I'm happy to provide a Blackbaud viewpoint on how to satisfy BI needs with RE NXT. There are many options that can get a little confusing and overwhelming if we don't approach this answer methodically, so I apologize in advance for the wall of text that this reply might turn into.


    Any time I hear about "custom reporting needs", I like to take a step back and make sure we're not assuming something is more "custom" than it really is. So I would start first and foremost with:

    Option #1: Out-of-the-box SKY Reports

    • This includes Lists (check out the filters and optional columns to see if they help).
    • By the way, as of today you can export data in Lists to CSV which may help depending on your needs
    • This also includes the dashboards available in Analyze. 
    • As a part of this evaluation, I would also consider whether one or more process changes might help make these a possible solution. I've worked with a lot of orgs that tackle a complex custom report that end up eating up a lot of time and effort. When we discuss the real needs, we find that if they just started using Campaigns to group certain Funds or Appeals then one of the out-of-the-box reports would have worked for them (and wouldn't have been as fragile or demanding in terms of feed and care over time).
    Option #2: Custom SKY Reports

    As Josh mentioned, we are currently in an Early Adopter Program with our Insight/Report/Dashboard building tool for next gen solutions (like RE NXT). I would encourage you to ask for a demo of this to see if it looks like it might meet your needs. It offers a pretty good amount of flexibility for reporting needs and allows you to build out drillable insights and dashboards with a very simple drag-and-drop report building experience (you can toss that Custom Crystal report books aside). 

    Option #3: SKY API

    SKY API is definitely our long term answer for feeding into 3rd party BI tools (if there is a need to report collectively on both RE and non-RE data). As Joshua mentions, the API is actively being developed, so depending on your needs the endpoints you need to do this may or may not yet be in the APIs. Please do check though and let us know if there are endpoints missing that would make the difference in this being a viable solution to your needs. developer.blackbaud.com

    Option #4: RE7/database view out-of-the box Crystal Reports

    These are absolutely still an option to use, and while we can't wait to support any and all of the needs that these solve, there are over 100 out-of-the-box reports in database view that are there for a reason and have a lot of options you can explore to see if they meet your needs.

    Option #5: Export-based Custom Crystal Reports

    Export based custom crystal reports are also still supported in the RE NXT world. So if you can get the data you need out of an export, you can design a report that displays it the way you want through the Crystal Custom Report Builder tool that is available to all hosted clients.

    Option #6: Database view exports

    If you an get the data you need out of export (from database view) but need other (non-RE) data, you can simply leverage raw exports form database view to get the data out in a usable format.

    Option #7: Local Database Backups

    If you can tolerate a certain level of "staleness" in your data (common since BI tools typically report on trends over time and not up-to-the-minute data), then there are options available (some free and some at an additional cost) to deliver backups of your RE7/database view data on a monthly/weekly/nightly basis. Once you get that backup, you can attach it to a local SQL Server and run and feeds or reports that you were used to running as self-hosted client.


    This is my least favorite option as its additional work, possible additional cost, and is less "integrated" than would be ideal, but it may very well be a nice way to meet the needs while the out-of-the-box SKY reports, Insight builder, and SKY API are evolving to meet your long-term needs. We do have some really good examples (success storie) of organizations that have taken advantage of our Weekly Backups offering (for example), to feed into their local, 3rd party BI tools.


    I actually hosted a webinar a few months ago with Dan Bowman (Product Manager - SKY API) that focused on the upgrade from RE7 to RE NXT for sophisticated organizations. Custom reporting/BI needs were one of the specific topics that we touched on in that webinar. Feel free to watch the recording here: https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/1476441/E54863889AFEA9FEC8E13F510958B231


    I hope this helps!


    Thanks,

    Jarod Bonino

    Product Manager, Raiser's Edge

     

    Jarod, thank you for taking the time to provide various options.  Some of those we've tried and decided it wouldn't work for our needs (exports, crystal reports, etc).  Most of our BI reports have subscriptions that are emailed to a wide range of people on a daily or weekly basis and that isn't possible in NXT yet.  Because the API isn't fully built out and I don't yet have the skill set to do that, I don't think it is an option.  I've been spending time to see if analyze would work but honestly haven't found anything that does yet.  (One issue I've run into is the fact that Planned Gifts are only listed in detail gift records and not part of summary totals... but that is just one of many issues).  I understand your comments about customization - we started down that road becasue we couldn't get the reports with the data that we wanted from any options that were available. 


    I am also aware of the weekly download and we are going to have to do that, but feel weekly isn't often enough.  I know that you just starting offering a daily download for a fee.  Our management team believes that we bought the data warehouse solution because it was supported by Blackbaud and we don't feel we should be paying extra to get a daily download of data.


    The one thing that may have possibility is the Insight/Report/Dashboard building tool.  I've been asking various people who I can get access to it.  We saw a demo of it last spring and thought it might be a partial solution.  How do I go about getting that access?


    Again, tahnks for all of the information you provided - I do appreciate it even if it isn't a solution for us. 

  • Jarod Bonino
    Jarod Bonino ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Participation for the Early Adopter Program for Insight builder is limited to currently live clients and may be closed by now. I do know that we are working toward a Limited Availability milestone where we intend to light up access to more clients. I am happy to forward this chain on the Anthony Tomaino so that you and your organization can be considered for that, but that won't really help prior to your RE NXT go live date.... It sounds like nightly/weekly backups might be the way to go for the short term. 


    I did want to clarify one thing:

    "Most of our BI reports have subscriptions that are emailed to a wide range of people on a daily or weekly basis and that isn't possible in NXT yet."


    The reporst in Analyze actually do support scheduled delivery on a daily or weekly basis. While you can't sign up others to receive those reports, most email clients do have fairly robut auto-forwarding rules that you could use to effectively receive and redistribute any email Analyze reports from RE NXT in an automatic fashion.
  • Susan Sullivan 2
    Susan Sullivan 2 ✭
    Ancient Membership First Reply

    Jarod Bonino:

    Participation for the Early Adopter Program for Insight builder is limited to currently live clients and may be closed by now. I do know that we are working toward a Limited Availability milestone where we intend to light up access to more clients. I am happy to forward this chain on the Anthony Tomaino so that you and your organization can be considered for that, but that won't really help prior to your RE NXT go live date.... It sounds like nightly/weekly backups might be the way to go for the short term. 


    I did want to clarify one thing:

    "Most of our BI reports have subscriptions that are emailed to a wide range of people on a daily or weekly basis and that isn't possible in NXT yet."


    The reporst in Analyze actually do support scheduled delivery on a daily or weekly basis. While you can't sign up others to receive those reports, most email clients do have fairly robut auto-forwarding rules that you could use to effectively receive and redistribute any email Analyze reports from RE NXT in an automatic fashion.

    We're currently live with NXT... Is it too late to get into the early adopter program for Insight Builder?  I was in Anthony's session on SKY Reporting at bbcon, and would love to try out some of the components he demo'ed.


    Thanks,

    Susan Sullivan

    High Point University

  • Lily Barger
    Lily Barger ✭
    Seventh Anniversary Facilitator 1 Name Dropper Photogenic
    Hi Jarod, we would also like to explore this. 
  • Forrest Smith
    Forrest Smith ✭
    Tenth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Photogenic

    Jarod Bonino:

    Participation for the Early Adopter Program for Insight builder is limited to currently live clients and may be closed by now. I do know that we are working toward a Limited Availability milestone where we intend to light up access to more clients. I am happy to forward this chain on the Anthony Tomaino so that you and your organization can be considered for that, but that won't really help prior to your RE NXT go live date.... It sounds like nightly/weekly backups might be the way to go for the short term. 


    I did want to clarify one thing:

    "Most of our BI reports have subscriptions that are emailed to a wide range of people on a daily or weekly basis and that isn't possible in NXT yet."


    The reporst in Analyze actually do support scheduled delivery on a daily or weekly basis. While you can't sign up others to receive those reports, most email clients do have fairly robut auto-forwarding rules that you could use to effectively receive and redistribute any email Analyze reports from RE NXT in an automatic fashion.

    UNCW would also be interested in the early adopters programs.


    Forrest Smith

    Tech Analyst

    UNCW

  • Margi Baker
    Margi Baker ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Name Dropper Photogenic

    @Cindy Filler I see you posted this last fall. We are currently in a very similar situation and I'm curious as to what solution you went with. We're looking at several vendors to see if they can help, but I'd love to hear from another client who worked through this situation. Thanks!

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong ✭✭✭✭✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic

    @Margi Baker
    Before moving to NXT, we were 3rd party hosted and have access to RE and FE SQL database directly. We created many custom report that query the databases directly, even report that cross RE and FE.

    Moving to NXT, we have to “abandon” all of that reports, you can imagine a lot of people is not happy about it.

    What we did was, we created a data warehouse on Azure SQL, then uses Power Automate with SKY API to pull any data that can be pulled from there into the data warehouse (refresh happens every 4 hours). Any other data that is very difficult to get from SKY API or not possible, we use RE:Queue (paid service from BB) to automate the export of data from RE query and export, which then is picked up by our SFTP monitoring Power Automate flow to dump into data warehouse as well.

    From there, we now have the data needed to recreate 90% of the report that we used to have, using Power BI that pull data from the data warehouse.

  • Margi Baker
    Margi Baker ✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Name Dropper Photogenic

    @Alex Wong @Alex Wong This is very helpful. We are currently self-hosted and know that we'll have to leave our existing SQL-based reports behind and recreate them elsewhere. It's good to know there are solutions that make the process easier. Thanks for the reply!

  • Neal Zandonella
    Neal Zandonella ✭
    Fifth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Name Dropper Photogenic

    @Alex Wong
    Hey Alex. Interesting solution and I'm curious to know more.

    We also use various data warehouses to underly our own SSRS and Power BI reporting, and they are created by restoring our RENXT and FENXT database backups on a nightly schedule. BB backups are a for-pay BB service. We fetch them from Blackbaud's Azure Cloud storage and restore them in our local SQL Server instance. The data is one day old in reporting, which is an acceptable latency for our fundraising reporting. By restoring database backups and doing ETL directly on the source Dbs, we have access to any-and-all tables/fields/procedures/views/functions/and data native to RENXT and FENXT (Database View) Dbs. Can you explain some advantages you might see in your method(s) vs. ours. Thanks!

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong ✭✭✭✭✭
    Ninth Anniversary Facilitator 4 Name Dropper Photogenic

    @Neal Zandonella
    SKY API does not have all data while using database backup has all data

    SKY API is free, but since not all data is available, need to use RE:Queue (paid service) that schedule export from database view, but then still NOT all data is available as compare to database backup where you have full access to all data

    I don't know the cost for nightly backup.

    nightly backup is 1 day old, and I don't know if you have automated the restore process. SKY API and RE:Queue is an automated process, pretty much hands off once it is setup. (as long as Microsoft and Blackbaud doesn't give me server side error)

    If your org is OK with report and dashboard that's based on 1-day old data, and the restore process is automated without user intervention, then stay with that method.

    My org would like to have reports that is more current throughout the business day, so we don't use nightly backup method. (we are every 4 hours refresh)

  • Neal Zandonella
    Neal Zandonella ✭
    Fifth Anniversary Facilitator 1 Name Dropper Photogenic

    @Alex Wong

    Hello Alex, I can confirm we have automated the restore process and since our fundraising reports are generally weekly or monthly reports, the 1 day lag suits are purposes. Folks pulling ad hoc reports understand that gift processing in general, and corresponding report may lag by 1 day or more.

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